Suppose all the readers of this column were gathered together in one room. At the front, standing before the lectern or podium or whatever the hell you call it, I pose a question: Any of you know something about Tom Everitt? Almost everyone in the room would probably answer: “Tom Whoveritt?” Perhaps one or two who had read my book THE ART OF DETECTION and were blessed with a photographic memory might say: “Wasn’t he the guy who provided the plots for Manny Lee to turn into Ellery Queen radio scripts after Fred Dannay dropped out and before Anthony Boucher came aboard?”

Indeed he was. But aside from that fact, and the titles of more than thirty EQ scripts that were based on Everitt plot synopses, virtually nothing is known of him. While working on THE ART OF DETECTION I had ransacked the Web looking for a little more information about this mystery man but with no luck. Then out of the blue not long ago I received an email from a total stranger who, in the course of researching something else entirely, had unearthed more information about Everitt than I could have used even had I known of it in time to put it in the book. But there’s no reason I can’t summarize it here. Thank you, Jonathan Guss, for making this month’s column possible.

John Thompson Everitt, whom I’ll call JT just to make things simple, was born in Yonkers, New York on December 11, 1908. His ancestors had arrived in Massachusetts by 1643 and had settled in the New York City area near Jamaica by 1650. JT’s father, Charles Percy Everitt (1873-1951), was a well-known rare book dealer, and Charles’ brother Samuel Alexander Everitt (1871-1953) was a partner in the Doubleday publishing house until his retirement in 1930. JT’s older brother Charles Raymond Everitt (1901-1947) also went into the publishing business, working at Harcourt Brace and later, until his early death, at Little Brown, the publisher of a volume of memoirs by his and JT’s father (THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER: A RARE BOOKMAN IN SEARCH OF AMERICAN HISTORY, 1951).

In 1930 JT graduated from Yale, where he was known as a soccer player. A year later he was hired by the CBS radio network to write for its March of Time program. By 1940 he had moved into the advertising side of radio at the Young & Rubicam agency where, among many other jobs, he was tasked with handling a prospectus from the NBC radio network on The Green Hornet, for which NBC was seeking a sponsor. Apparently he was still working at that agency when he became involved with the Ellery Queen series.

Since its debut in June of 1939, every one of the scripts for the series had been written by Manfred B. Lee based on plot synopses prepared by his cousin and EQ collaborator Fred Dannay. (More precisely, every one except “The Dauphin’s Doll,” first broadcast around Christmastime 1943 and written by Manny alone.) Early in 1944 Fred’s wife was diagnosed with cancer. The burdens of taking care of two young children, plus editing a large annual anthology of short mystery fiction and running Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM), which had been launched in the fall of 1941, soon made it impossible for Fred to continue coming up with a plot a week for the radio series.

He was several synopses ahead when he dropped out, and Manny squirreled these away for use in emergencies, relying most of the time on recycling earlier scripts under new titles and condensing 60-minute scripts from the show’s first season (1939-40) into its current half-hour format. But these ploys couldn’t go on indefinitely. Somebody had to be found to take over Fred’s function.

How TJ came into the picture remains unknown. Possibly it was through his older brother Charles, who was working at Little Brown, publisher of the Queen novels and anthologies since 1942. Perhaps it was due to the connections Fred and Manny had retained with the advertising and publicity businesses where they’d gotten their start. Whether he was the first man brought in to assume Fred’s function as plot provider remains unclear.

We don’t know exactly how many Dannay synopses Manny had in reserve, but several of the episodes dating from late 1944 strike me as too outrageous to have stemmed from Fred. Take, for example, “Cleopatra’s Snake” (October 12 & 14, 1944). As backstage observer of a live production of Antony and Cleopatra for experimental TV, Ellery becomes a key witness when the genuine poisonous snake being used in the death scene (yeah, right) bites to death the actress playing Cleopatra.

Now let’s consider “The Glass Sword” (November 30 & December 2, 1944), in which Ellery tackles the case of the circus sword swallower who died when the sword in his stomach broke while the lights were out. Was it Everitt who cranked out the synopses that Manny turned into these scripts? Was it another Dannay substitute? Or, wacko though they are, could they have originated with Fred after all? For more information, keep reading.

The earliest EQ script that we know came from a synopsis by Everitt was “The Diamond Fence” (January 24, 1945), which involves the murder of a middleman for stolen gems and the disappearance of five diamond rings from the scene of the crime under impossible circumstances. A substantial excerpt from this episode survives on audio as a “sneak preview” from the Armed Forces Radio Service.

From that point at least through the end of March, every script Manny wrote was based on Everitt material. It was during these early months of the last full year of World War II that Manny enlisted Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) to take over Everitt’s function. It was an ideal choice. Boucher had already published seven novels in the Queen vein and had had short stories published in EQMM. Also, as we know from comments in various of his mystery reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle, he was an enthusiastic fan of the radio series.

Since Tony lived in Berkeley, California and Manny on the east coast, collaboration on EQ radio scripts required vast correspondence between the two. This correspondence, archived at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, documents their work together in microscopic detail. The only aspect of it that concerns us here is Manny’s continual snarky remarks about Everitt, of which I’ll quote a few.

On May 3, 1945, about six weeks before the broadcast of the first Boucher-Lee collaboration, Manny tells Tony that he’s “washed up” with Everitt, who “will do four more for us, and then he’s through. This by mutual agreement.” On the 17th of the same month, he says: “We want to avoid some of the weaknesses resulting from our present man’s so-called efforts….” And on the 24th he lets Tony know how he really feels about Everitt: “….At the end of our association with our ‘man,’ as I like to call him—hating his smug, treacherous guts as I do!—we’re finding more trouble…and sloppier submissions on his part even than usual….”

On January 24, 1946, he describes one of the Everitt synopses he had to deal with as “a bad outline which I bought only because I was desperate …and bought and paid for it with the mental reservation that I’d probably have to do a thorough re-working job on it. I was a noble prophet.”

But, simply because the EQ radio formula was so complex and demanding and Boucher with all his other commitments couldn’t conjure up a new plot synopsis on a weekly basis, Manny was forced to make further commitments to Everitt. “This was a desperation move,” he tells Boucher on October 30, 1946, “as his stuff always gives me headaches, but good….I had to do something in self-protection. I heartily wish now I hadn’t made that commitment…. But it can’t be undone and I can only hope that he doesn’t come through, so that I can order more from you.”

Almost a year later Manny is still reluctantly dealing with Everitt now and then and, in a letter to Fred Dannay dated November 4, 1947, griping about it just as loudly. Discussing the possibility of repeating some of the scripts based on Everitt synopses, he describes Everitt as “such a son-of-a-bitch that, even though our rights to repeat the material without payment are clear, he would raise a considerable stink in the business if we didn’t pay him an extra fee….[F]or the most part he got tremendously overpaid in the original payment—the bulk of the creative work was done by me, out of sheer necessity.”

If Manny were to offer a token fee of perhaps $50 per episode recycled, Everitt “would start haggling and chiseling and his tongue would wag plenty in the business….” What business Manny is referring to becomes clear later in the same letter. “[Y]ou don’t know…what that bastard has been saying and is still saying in the advertising business about his ‘part’ in the Queen show. There is no protection against his kind of conscienceless and unscrupulously shrewd self-propaganda….”

As his correspondence with both Fred and Boucher demonstrates, at least during the radio years Manny was a Type A personality with a genius for getting hot under the collar, and the insane pressure of putting out a program every week probably shortened his life.

Whether he was being too harsh on JT is hard to judge. One of the few living persons to have seen any of the Everitt material Manny turned into scripts is Ted Hertel, who helped choose the scripts included in THE ADVENTURE OF THE MURDERED MOTHS (2005). In connection with that project he was erroneously sent the synopses for “The Right End” and “The Glass Sword,” both with Everitt’s name on them.

To judge by Ted’s comments, what Everitt gave Manny to work with was just as bad as Manny said it was. In an email to me he described the synopses as “so poorly written, so amateurish, that they could not possibly have been the work of Manny in any form.” (The scripts Manny based on these synopses were broadcast respectively on November 16 and 30, 1944.)

Only one episode Manny based on an Everitt synopsis is available on audio. In “Number 31″ (September 7, 1947) Ellery tries to crack the secret of international mystery man George Arcaris’s success at smuggling diamonds into the Port of New York and to comfort a wonderfully dignified black woman by solving the murder of her son, the servant for a wealthy man-about-town. The cases seem unconnected until Ellery discovers the number 31 popping up in both.

It’s an excellent episode, but how much credit should go to Everitt remains a mystery since no one in the last 70 years has seen his synopsis. I wouldn’t be surprised if the black woman was entirely the creation of the staunchly liberal Manny Lee.

To the best of my knowledge the only Everitt radio work besides his EQ plots was a single script for The Shadow. In “The Creature That Kills” (January 6, 1946) Lamont Cranston, alias The Shadow, investigates the theft of priceless papers from the 20th-floor laboratory of a brilliant young scientist under impossible circumstances.

It turns out that the thief, a master criminal with a Sydney Greenstreet voice, had an accomplice in the form of a trained 27-foot python which slid down the side of the building from the window directly above the scientist’s lab, got hold of the papers, then slid back up the wall to its master. What a snake! Do I detect here the same kind of wackiosity that pervades the EQ scripts about Cleopatra and the glass sword?

In 1947 Everitt returned to radio full-time as Eastern program manager for the ABC network. We don’t know if he wrote any more for the medium, but Jonathan Guss mentions one script he contributed to the golden age of live TV drama, “Revenge by Proxy” (Colgate Theatre, May 14, 1950). The cast included Nancy Coleman, Phil Arthur, Bernard Kates and Victor Sutherland. As chance would have it, the following week’s drama, “Change of Murder,” was based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich.

Everitt died on November 2, 1954, at age 45. Today he seems to be totally forgotten, perhaps deservedly so. The most that can be claimed for him is that he figures as a footnote in the Ellery Queen story. But at least now that footnote has been written.

I have a fondness for the unusual in fiction. Mainstream popular fiction bores me. Take me somewhere I didn’t expect to be or have never been, and I will forgive the creative talent for a lot. Below are four crime-fighters that may not be the greatest radio detectives but are worth listening for their attempt to be different.

JOHNNY FLETCHER MYSTERY – “Navy Colt.” NBC, March 28, 1946. Written by Frank Gruber, based on the Frank Gruber novel of the same title. Cast: Albert Dekker as Johnny Fletcher, Mike Mazurki as Sam Cragg. *** Johnny and Sam are working a book scam when a beautiful young woman hires them to punch a man in the nose. Soon Johnny and Sam find themselves wanted by the police for murder.

The script in this complex mystery is filled with wisecracks and an occasional clue, making for a fun listen.

Pulp, mystery and western fans most likely recognize the name Frank Gruber, and maybe have read one or more of the fourteen comedy-crime books in the Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg series.

The books not only led to this radio audition episode but also a Republic studio film in 1946 with the same cast. While this episode mentions a second episode for this proposed NBC radio series there is no evidence it was ever made.

There was a radio series with Johnny and Sam on ABC (1948) with Bill Goodman as Johnny and Sheldon Leonard as Sam.

TALES OF FATIMA. – “A Time to Kill.” CBS, May 28, 1949. Written by Gail Ingram. Cast: Basil Rathbone as himself, Francis DeSales as Police Lieutenant Farrell. Basil’s plans for a weekend break from his role in a Broadway play are spoiled when someone tries to kill him.

The story is full of twists including Basil hearing a murder over the phone as well as a radio announcement that Basil was dead. It makes the plot confusing, but the series’ appeal is its humor.

It is also one of two radio detectives to have a voice from beyond help solve the mystery. Here the ancient spirit of Fatima gives Basil and the audience a clue (the other was Rogues Gallery where Eugor talks to Rogue as the PI recovers from being knocked out).

Basil Rathbone shows his sense of humor in this series that smashes the fourth wall to tiny tiny little bits. Not only is Fatima an ancient Spirit who helps the audience and Basil solve the case, but Fatima is also the name of a cigarette and the series sponsor.

This recording is from the podcast Great Detectives of Old Time Radio and worth a visit for any radio fans.

THE WHISPERER -“Policeman In Danger” NBC, July 29. 1951) Written by Jonathan Price. Cast: Carleton G. Young as Philip “The Whisperer” Gault, Betty Moran as Ellen Norris, and Paul Frees as Lt. Denvers. *** The Whisperer relays “The Syndicate” orders to local gang member to kill the bothersome Police Lt. Denvers. Gault and Ellen know and like the detective rush to save him.

The Whisperer was a summer replacement series based on the characters and stories by Dr. Stetson Humphrey and his wife Irene.

While playing college football Philip Gault was injured, leaving his voice a gruesome whisper. Gault decided to go undercover in the local Central City syndicate and destroy it. Then Doctor Lee with his nurse Ellen was able to restore Gault’s original voice. Gault decided to stay The Whisperer and use the information he learns to continue his fight against organized crime.

Each week The Whisperer would relay “The Syndicate” orders to the local Central City gang then Gault with Ellen at his side would prevent the Mob’s plans from succeeding.

The show played its strange premise straight with dialog that could be witty or awkwardly out of date. Uneven but fun, The Whisperer remains an odd crime-fighter worth a listen.

A VOICE IN THE NIGHT – “Case of the Worried Detective” Mutual, August 8, 1946. Written by Bob Arthur and David Kogan. Cast: Carl Brisson as himself. *** Carl’s weakness for beautiful women and a need to find a place to stay lands him in the hands of a Mob boss who demands Carl solve the murder of one of the Boss’s gang members.

Only two episodes are known to exist and both are terrible. Little is known about A Voice in the Night beyond that it is one of radio’s strangest PI’s.

International star Carl Brisson plays himself as the Golden Oriole nightclub owner and singer. The series’ focus is on Carl singing for the nightclub audience. Eventually Carl takes a break to share one of his crime-solving cases.

Nothing really works in this series that mashes together the music series and the mystery. The acting and writing is awful and seems unsure whether to take Brisson tales of crime solving seriously.

One of the appeals of mystery and crime fiction is the range of the protagonist, from brilliant to lucky, from serious to comedic. I will always have a weakness for the odd and different.

Some folks think it kinky of me, others merely shrug and roll their eyes, and a few have damned me from the pulpit for it, but I always thought Harold Peary was funny. Just something about that chuckle of his and the trademark hem-and-hawing, always gets a laugh out of me.

So I’m tempted to give Gildersleeve’s Ghost much more praise than it deserves from a discerning critic like myself. I can’t honestly recommend it to any serious movie buff either. But damitall, this movie has everything: ghosts, an old dark house, a mad doctor with a sinister assistant, an invisible woman, insulting comic relief, and an escaped gorilla. Who — I ask you WHO? — could ask for anything more?

Peary skips through it with his usual aplomb, and Gordon Douglas, whose career included Rio Conchos, Tony Rome, and Sincerely Yours, directs with the flippancy it deserves. I should also mention writer Robert Kent, who went on to a long and bizarre career with Sam Katzman, writing things like Hootenanny Hoot and The Fastest Guitar Alive.

As for Gildersleeve’s Ghost, it’s fast, light, and outrageous enough to keep you saying “Whuzza?” even if you don’t find it funny. Catch it if you can.

It’s pilot season at the major TV networks as the networks look for new shows for the 2018-19 season. Here is a link to Deadline’s “Primetime pilot panic” where you can read what each network is looking at for next season:

The creation of the pilot dates back to radio days when audition shows were used to find a sponsor or stations to support the show as a regularly appearing series. While radio used the word “audition” for the first example of the possible series, TV uses pilot from “pilot project.”

In the summer of 1940 CBS aired FORECAST, a series of radio episodes with the hope the audience would help them become a network series. Of these auditions two would become hits and continue to be remembered today, SUSPENSE and DUFFY’S TAVERN.

Below is DEDUCTION DELUXE, an episode from FORECAST second and final season. Despite its pleas to the radio audience DEDUCTION DELUXE did not survive for a second episode.

The episode sounded like a vaudeville sketch with its simple character types and non-stop patter of gags, many still funny. The mystery of who painted a rich lady’s poodle green was better than average as the writers for the most part played fair with the clues.

Real life married couple Adolphe Menjou and Verree Teasdale certainly had the right chemistry as PI Roger Boone and his wife Twyla Boone. The fatal flaw for the show was in the character of husband Roger Boone, a man who handled “clues, blondes and horses with equal enthusiasm.” Twyla seemed resigned to her husband sleeping with other women but I doubt the 1941 radio audience was as forgiving.

I can find nothing about this pilot beyond the on screen credits and the copyright is unreadable. The pilot was done by Paramount. Fess Parker worked for Paramount between 1958 and 1962. The credit for CBS Films and the sales pitch epilogue probably makes this a pilot for a possible syndicated series. Since Fess Parker was starring in MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON in 1962 we can narrow the time for this show even further to 1958-61.

While the story and characters were overly simple the show had a certain charm helped by a talented cast and a script that kept things moving.

Fess Parker played Charles Russell one of the greatest artists of the Old West, and a man of many talents and experiences. He was a good man who was as good with the gun as he was with a brush. Russell wrote about his times and travels through the Old West in books such as TRAILS PLOWED UNDER. Link from Project Gutenberg Australia: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700941h.html.

In an interesting twist, the premise of the series was not to be just a loosely based biography but instead the stories were to be based on Charlie Russell’s artwork. The pilot episode featured the famous painting “Innocent Allies.”

The story had Charlie partnering with a man called Windy to run a cattle drive. When Charlie and a young hothead cowboy witness a stage robbery, the young cowboy overreacts and runs off to stop the robbery. His gunfire starts a stampede. Charlie warns others of the approaching stampede and rescues the beautiful and feisty Bonnie, the new owner of the saloon. Charlie tries to help the young man grow up while he paints for Bonnie “Innocent Allies” – his eyewitness account of the stage holdup.

RUSSELL had the makings for a successful series but Westerns were fading during the years 1958-1961 as the PI and modern detective was growing in its popularity.

GLOBAL FREQUENCY . WB, 2005 Cast: Michelle Forbes as Miranda Zero, Aimee Garcia as Aleph, Josh Hopkins as Sean Flynn and Jenni Baird as Dr. Katrina Finch. * The on-air credits were clipped from this YouTube copy of the 45-minute pilot. The series was created by Warren Ellis based on the popular award winning graphic novel series. John Rogers wrote the script, or at least he was the main writer for the pilot that was directed by Nelson McCormick. (Sources: IMdb and Wikipedia.)

Before WB had made its decision about the fate of GLOBAL FREQUENCY the episode was leaked to the Internet. According to an email by creator Warren Ellis sent out to fans he claimed WB was so unhappy over the leak they rejected the pilot (CBR.com, July 29, 2005). It would not be the first time or the last Hollywood egos destroyed a quality program.

Here is a YouTube clip explaining the premise.

Global Frequency is a secret independent organization created to do the dirty jobs that threaten the world. Run by Miranda Zero, a former top spy, with the aid of Aleph, a young female computer expert who from a high tech base assists and contacts field agents.

Global Frequency’s agents are a group of people with various talents and connections from all over the world waiting for that call that they are needed to save the world, or at least part of it. This is one of my favorite plot devices and the way it is handled would have hooked me on the series.

The story began when disgraced ex-cop Sean finds the dead body of a Global Frequency agent. It seems San Francisco will be destroyed in 55 minutes. Sean joins in to help find the man who killed the agent and now is a threat to destroy San Francisco.

Everything works here. The writing based on an award winning graphic novel series, the cast, the direction, the production, all are excellent. The characters are likable and developed. This even has the most elusive of all qualities, excellent chemistry between the actors.

Every time I watch a TV thriller like GLOBAL FREQUENCY that blends technology and the human hero so entertainingly, I remember the objections that Hugh O’Brian had during SEARCH (NBC 1972) that the technology not upstage him and again I realize how better SEARCH could have been.

CALLAHAN. ABC – Carsey/Werner Company Production in association with Finnegan Associates, September 9, 1982. Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis as Rachel Bartlett, Hart Bocher as Callahan, John Harkins as Marcus Vox, and Peter Maloney as Mustaf. Created by Ken Finkleman. Developed and Written by David Misch and Ken Finkleman. Directed by Harry Winer

This funny pilot spoof of the Indiana Jones movie unfairly faced some challenges that had nothing to do with the quality of the episode entitled “Appointment In Rangoon.”

Plucky innocent Rachel Bartlett applies for the job of assistant to the Director of Research (Callahan) at the Regis Foundation. The job interview quickly expands from Callahan’s academic office into a dangerous thrill-filled chase across the world.

Overly focused on his work, Callahan is clueless to how unaccustomed Miss Bartlett (as Callahan calls her) is to the action. But Rachel does not let the constant dangers to her life or her torn and increasingly disappearing dress stop her from helping Callahan to recover the object, stop the villain and save the world.

However quality writing and acting does not always lead a pilot to series. CALLAHAN wanted to become an ABC series for the 1982-83 season. But TV cop spoof POLICE SQUAD had just bombed on ABC during the 1981-82 season. ABC’s pilots for the 1982-83 season had contained more than one Indiana Jones inspired pilot. ABC chose the action drama TALES OF THE GOLDEN MONKEY.

YouTube continues to be a great place to find failed pilots, so coming soon I will look at four more failed pilots from the past.

I find the effect of television on the young quite interesting. Bear with me, this isn’t as off-topic as you think…

I was nine years old when I first watched Return of the Saint. I think it’s fair to say that show corrupted me and changed my life. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t just the show that did that, but the books by Leslie Charteris as well. I spent years making sure I collected every possible Saint adventure, joined The Saint Club and was privileged to know Leslie and Audrey Charteris. I’ve also written a number of books about the Saint and Leslie Charteris and yes, there’s more to come.

Around the same time I discovered The Falcon, the BBC were kind enough to show many of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films. Now that wasn’t my introduction to Holmes and Watson for I’d already read the works of Conan Doyle, but for many, many years after to me Rathbone and Bruce were Holmes and Watson.

Then one day, whilst having a post-prandial coffee with a certain Mr Charteris, worlds collided for he mentioned that he wrote some Sherlock Holmes scripts with his friend Denis Green.. Over the course of our subsequent lunches (in a pre-internet age) he graciously answered my questions about them but since it was almost fifty years ago that he worked on the, his memory was not replete with the details I wanted.

As the internet matured I managed to find out more details about the shows but no recordings or scripts from them.

After Leslie died I got to know Audrey fairly well and we talked at length about many things. Occasionally she dropped hints that she thought some of Leslie’s Holmes scripts had survived and might be in their Dublin flat, but that was as far as I could get.

After Audrey died in 2014 Leslie’s family asked me to go through their flat in Dublin. There indeed I found a stack of Leslie’s Sherlock Holmes scripts alongside many other gems. I was, needless to say, rather delighted. More so when his family gave me permission to get them into print.

So thanks to television, here’s the first volume of a missing chapter in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson…

I’ve asked Ian Dickerson, the author of the following book to tell us more about it. He’s most graciously agreed:

IAN DICKERSON – Who Is The Falcon?: The Detective In Print, Movies, Radio and TV. Purview Press. softcover, December 2016.

Back in the dim and distant past, when I was just a lad, I discovered the adventures of the Saint. (I know, I know, I’ve kept that quiet….) In those heady days I was a sucker for any new Saint-like adventure so when the BBC ran out of old black and white Saint films to show and moved onto something called ‘The Falcon.’ my place in front of the television was assured for a few more weeks.

Those early Falcon films were remarkably Saintly, and although the later ones got a little more creative — The Falcon and the Co-Eds anyone? — they were still firmly in the gentleman detective genre and my teen -aged self was happy.

Fast forward a few years — well, okay, quite a few years — and I discovered old time radio shows. But I soon had a problem, I had all the episodes of The Saint on tape and being greedy I wanted more. Then I discovered the Falcon had also appeared on radio! Aha, problem solved I thought! But when I listened to the tapes I discovered the Falcon — that radio Falcon — was a hard boiled 1940s PI and bore virtually no resemblance to the gentleman detective of the George Sanders and Tom Conway films. At a time when the Internet was only really just booting up, I had no way of establishing what had happened, but I rather enjoyed those hard-boiled PI adventures so quickly ordered some more.

Fast forward a few more years and with the help of the now mature Internet, I discovered that not only had the Falcon also appeared in books, magazines and on TV, but that the radio show had run for over a decade and there had been over four hundred and eighty episodes.

I wanted to learn things; to find out why there were two different characters and how they’d come to be changed, to find out more about the Falcon’s TV adventures and see if I could find copies of them, I also wanted to know more about his stint on radio — who played him? Who wrote the stories? What were they about? And for the geek in me … had I listened to all the ones that were available? (I certainly have now!)

And I wanted to celebrate a character that had survived sixteen films, a handful of books, thirty-nine episodes of television and that long run on radio.

So I wrote a book.

Who is the Falcon? tells the story of all the Falcon’s adventures in print, on radio, in film and television. And there’s even a Falcon short story from the 1940s thrown in for good measure.

The espionage adventure radio series referred to appeared on the NBC network between 1932 and 1934, as I understand it. This is a long time ago, and information is hard to come by when it comes to radio this old. No copies of any of the episodes are known to exist. This movie was made in 1936 or 1937, and another radio series came along in 1939, one called Secret Agent K-7 Returns.

This second series was carried by CBS and starred Jay Jostyn, an actor best known by OTR fans for his long-running lead role in the program Mr. District Attorney. The second series of K-& adventures lasted for 78 episodes, many of which are generally available and in circulation. See The Digital Deli website for more details.

Any resemblance between the movie and the second radio series is next to none. In the movie, agent K-7, by name “Lanny” Landers and played by Walter McGrail, is not a spy of any kind, but an undercover agent for the FBI. Home from abroad, he’s asked to help crack down on organized crime in a city filled with hoodlums, gamblers and gangsters of all sorts.

Most of the activity in the film takes place in and around a nightclub owned by Eddie Geller, who has just been the beneficiary of a hung jury. When he is killed in his office, it is the fiancé of reporter Olive O’Day (Queenie Smith) who is the primary suspect. She, of course, asks Landers for help.

The detective story that follows is a complicated one, with lots of suspects and false trails, as many as can be squeezed into a cramped 70 minutes worth of running time, which also includes a song by one Joy Hodges, later known for helping Ronald Reagan launch his acting career. The killer is obvious, though, from the very first moment he appears on the screen, taking the sheen off most of what follows. There are glimpses of what otherwise could have been, but “could have been” never counts for very much.

One of old time radio’s (OTR) characters most fondly remembered is the series host/announcer. Radio programs needed a way to introduce the series and episode to the listener. Limited to just words and sounds radio created the host role.

Perhaps one of the appeals of listening to radio drama was how often the fourth wall was ignored. It began with the host/announcer who would talk directly to the listener. It gave the program and the listener at home a personal connection, as if the story was being told directly to you.

There were several basic types of host/announcer. It could be an announcer or famous celebrity or a fictional character. He or she could exist separate from the story or be a fictional character narrating the story or a real celebrity who introduces the story and at times joins the cast and performs as one of the characters in the story, or in rare cases a real announcer could interact with the fictional characters (usually to promote the sponsor).

One of the earliest radio series to have a fictional character as host was the 1930 CBS anthology DETECTIVE STORY HOUR. The character with the strange eerie voice was The Shadow, a character that has had a long successful career. For those who wish to learn more about the pulp/radio icon I recommend the book SHADOW SCRAPBOOK by the character’s creator Walter B. Gibson (with Anthony Tollin).

Here is the first episode from the Mutual Network version of THE SHADOW. “Death House Blues” aired September 26, 1937 and introduced him to the Mutual audience. In the story The Shadow played by Orson Welles works to save an innocent man from the electric chair.

Characters such as Philip Marlowe, Rocky Jordan, and Archie Goodwin for Nero Wolfe would break the fourth wall to talk to the audience, set the mood and begin narrating the story.

LIVES OF HARRY LIME was a BBC production and syndicated in America, airing various places including Mutual radio network. The series was based on the character from the film THE THIRD MAN, star Orson Welles would return to play Harry Lime in this prequel to the 1949 British film.

THE LIVES OF HARRY LIME “Too Many Crooks” (Mutual, August 3, 1951), It begins when Harry receives a letter asking for his help rob a bank in Budapest. As zither music sets the proper THIRD MAN mood, Harry profits from the plans of some very untrustworthy bank robbers.

The Shadow’s spooky voice fit radio well for establishing mood. Hosts for series such as LIGHTS OUT began to warn the listeners of the terrors to come. Some of the more entertaining hosts would go beyond the spooky voice to the rantings of an insane lunatic. Among the better ones were GUEST OF DOOM, DARKNESS, WITCH’S TALE, STRANGE DR WEIRD, WEIRD CIRCLE, HERMIT’S CAVE, and BLACK CHAPEL.

Forgotten BLACK CASTLE remains one of the best examples of the madman host. BLACK CASTLE featured host The Wizard and his pet raven Diablo. Don Douglas not only played the host but he also did all of the voices.

A warning about the episode “Jungle Adventure,” it was done during WWII and has a un-PC attitude about the Japanese and island natives.

BLACK CASTLE “Jungle Adventure” (Mutual, September 25, 1943). Two American airmen crash on a small Pacific island.

Some hosts could be downright judgmental towards the fictional characters in the story (THE WHISTLER) or some hosts were notably uncaring to what happened to the people of the story (THE CLOCK, DEVIL’S SCRAPBOOK and THE CROUPIER).

One who was judgmental and uncaring was Fate in DIARY OF FATE, played by Herbert Lytton.

DIARY OF FATE “The Entry of Tyler White” (ABC, April 6, 1948). Tyler White is about to be executed for a murder he did not commit.

Not all hosts were scary some were quite friendly such as in WORLD ADVENTURERS CLUB, and THE CASEBOOKS OF GREGORY HOOD.

The CRIME CLUB host The Librarian (Barry Thomson) was always eager to help us with that book or manuscript we wanted. Many of the stories were adaptations of actual books published by Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint .

CRIME CLUB “Mr. Smith’s Hat” (Mutual, January 22, 1947). Gilbert Shannon calls Inspector McKee to report his own murder. A few moments after he hangs up the Inspector gets a call from Shannon’s daughter who has discovered her father’s dead body. Witty dialog highlights the story based on a book by Helen Reilly and adapted by Stedman Coles.

Celebrities were popular choices to host drama anthologies, such as radio producer Arch Oboler (LIGHTS OUT), writers such as John Dickson Carr (MURDER BY EXPERTS) and actors such as Peter Lorre (MURDER IN THE AIR).

CREEPS BY NIGHT aired on the Blue network with Boris Karloff as host and actor. The series was done on the West coast. When the series moved to the East coast with episode #13 “The Walking Dead (May 16, 1944) Karloff stayed behind and the mysterious Dr. X took over as host. The name of the actor who played Dr. X was never revealed.

CREEPS BY NIGHT “The Final Reckoning” (Blue network, May 2, 1944). George Miller is out of prison after serving 20 years for a murder he did not commit. George feels his life has been wasted and is obsessed with revenge against the man who framed him.

One of the most important roles for the host/announcer was to promote the sponsor. Series such as MYSTERY HOUSE would take a comment made by the characters to remind everyone about the sponsor. INNER SANCTUM Mr. Host enjoyed his creaking door and pun filled introductions but then he would turn to Mary to discuss the perfection and joy the sponsor’s product would bring to the listener’s life.

But no host/announcer was more interested in the sponsor than the host of a kid’s show, radio serials such as CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT, JACK ARMSTRONG ALL AMERICAN BOY, DICK TRACY, and endless others push their promos like maps and code rings and nagged kids to get their Mom or Dad to buy the sponsor’s product.

TOM MIX RALSTON STRAIGHT SHOOTERS “The Green Man” (Mutual, June 30, 1944). A swami arrives and tries to buy Longwind Wilson house that keeps disappearing because of a former cactus now anti-social Green Man. Not the most PC but still fun. In this episode Tom Mix was played by Joe “Curley” Bradley.

Not all serials were aimed at kids and their parents’ bank account. There would be soap operas for Mom (ROMANCES OF HELEN TRENT and BACKSTAGE WIFE), adventure (ADVENTURES BY MORSE and SHADOWS OF FU MANCHU), mysteries (CHARLIE CHAN and I LOVE A MYSTERY), and spies (ANN OF THE AIRLINES).

But no matter the type of radio serial all of them needed the host/announcer to keep the audience up to date on the continuing story that usually aired three to five times a week.

Here is an episode from PERRY MASON, a radio series that would evolve into TV soap opera EDGE OF NIGHT.

PERRY MASON “The Case of the Puzzled Suitor’ (CBS, June 7, 1944). A rich scientist wants Mason to write his will, but a woman had early warned Mason that the scientist was being coerced.

One of the things the Internet has given us is access to the past unlike ever before. You can listen to OTR at YouTube, Internet Archive (archive.org) and various other places on the Internet. Whether you remember when the shows first aired or you are listening for the first time, OTR offers a variety of wonderful entertainment, shows more often than not introduced by a host/announcer.

Marie Wilson, who made a career of playing ditsy blondes, will be remembered best for her portrayal of Irma Peterson, the impossibly vacuous New York City secretary with a mind the size of a paper clip. This was the second film to feature Irma, who began her career on radio in 1947, but as usually the case, of all the people who were in the cast on the radio program, only Marie Wilson managed to make the transition into the movies.

And even though creator Cy Howard was also involved in the movie production, much of the magic her character created in her original form is gone. In fact, Irma is on the screen far less than the up-and-coming comedy team of Martin and Lewis. Incidentally, they also appeared in the first Irma picture as well — their screen debut, no less.

The plot is simple enough — Dean Martin, who plays the boy friend of Irma’s friend Jane, gets a shot at Hollywood, or so he thinks, and the whole gang goes along. It;s to bad that, unknown to them, the boys in the white suits come along afterward to pick up the “producer” who hired him. (But what about the French actress with eyes for Dean?)

Irma continued on the radio for four more years, until 1954, but there weren’t any more movies. It’s no wonder why. When writers lose the roots of their own creations, chances of a successful transplant are next to none.

Syndication studio Frederic W. Ziv Company is best remembered for its several low budget syndicated TV series such as Sea Hunt and Highway Patrol. The company also had its successes in radio, and many of those series would continue their success in TV, shows such as Boston Blackie and The Cisco Kid.

Despite the falling popularity of radio in the 1950s due to the rising interest in TV, Ziv found a way to convince famous movie stars to star in transcribed radio series. Their first success was with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Bold Venture (reviewed here and its TV version reviewed here ).

Next Ziv convinced Irene Dunne and Fred MacMurray to star in the radio series Bright Star. This was Ziv’s first comedy. Unlike many other Ziv’s radio series, Bright Star apparently was never adapted for television.

So how was Ziv able to convince such famous movie stars as Bogart, Bacall, Dunne and MacMurray to star in a weekly radio series? They gave them a huge amount of money.

According to Broadcasting (August 13,1951) Dunne and MacMurray each were paid $300,000 for a 10 year radio contract with an opt-out clause after 52 episodes. Three episodes were taped each week with a budget of $12,500 per half-hour episode. Broadcasting claimed this was the second highest budget in radio next only to Bold Venture. Billboard (August 18, 1951) claimed Bright Star was higher than Bold Venture by $2,500.

Both Broadcasting and Billboard reported writers were to include Milton Geiger, Carl Gass, and Richard Powell. Henry Hayward would direct. Broadcasting added that additional cast members would include Elvia Allman and Michael Miller.

Bright Star was about the daily operation of the small town newspaper, the Hillsdale Morning Star. Susan Armstrong voiced by Irene Dunne was the paper’s publisher and editor. George Harvey voiced by Fred MacMurray was the paper’s top reporter. As required by romantic comedy rules the two constantly argued when not trying to romance the other.

George and the Informer:

George was getting increasing attention due to a series of articles he was writing exposing a mob leader. Susan began to worry when George refused to tell her his source.

This was one of the better episodes but still far from great radio. The soft character humor ruled over any realism in the plots. Not surprisingly after fifty-two episodes were transcribed the two stars opted out of their contract and the series ended.

According to Broadcasting (September 10. 1951) Ziv claimed Bright Star that was due to debut in two weeks had been sold in 183 cities including 21 of the 63 television cities in the United States. While not the success of Bold Venture, which was in 427 stations when it debuted in March 1951 (Broadcasting April 2, 1951), the transcribed episodes of Bright Star would remain on the air for years.

It was the fifties and the networks were turning their attention from radio to television. As Billboard examined in its October 16, 1954 issue, this left the local radio stations searching for programming. Ziv’s transcribed radio series became popular with stations and local advertisers. Shows such as Bright Star would continue to air on the radio at least into the mid-50s.